Maddy McCready

Hi my name is Maddy McCready and I am currently a Communication Design student at Swinburne University, graduating mid 2025. I am an aspiring creative designer hoping to expand my skills and knowledge within this field. Throughout my studies at Swinburne I've developed a range of skills including photography, publication, branding, and more. Outside of my design work I love anything creative and I am often learning a new arts and craft skill just for fun. My passion summed up would be art, animals, and travel.

Take a look at some of my work below, and check out my web folio for more.

Coral Bleaching Campaign

The “Save Our Reef” campaign promotes practicing reef friendly activities to help protect our coral reefs from the harsh effects of coral bleaching. This campaign aims to advise and spread awareness about this issue using a positive tone and fun designs. I created a series of 4 posters, with different suggestions on what you can do to lower your impact and protect our reefs.

Essence Rebrand

For my major communication design assignment, I rebranded the drugstore makeup brand “Essence”. The goal of this rebrand was to mature the brand's style to target their audience more effectively and provide some promotional images that match their new look. This is an example of a promotional poster I made using my product photography, and elements from the brand guide I created.

Hard Light Portrait

This studio portrait was taken using hard light with red and blue filters. This was a fashion shoot, showing off the blazer's silhouette in a sharp and sophisticated way. This assignment was to shoot fashion in both hard and soft lighting in a photography studio, learning many skills including lighting, camera settings, and Adobe Photoshop.

Monothematic Publication

Using the article “The Cultural Politics of Gender Performance” I made this publication. The article is about the stigma and how the LGBTQ community is perceived in China. The concept around this design was to present this article in a simple and elegant way, using traditional symbols and calligraphy in a minimalistic way.

Album Cover

The brief for this project was to trial different experimental ways to create imagery for music genres. My genre for this assignment was Pop, and this album cover was for the sub-genre Psychedelic Pop. To create this experiment I used milk, food dye, and dish soap to recreate a liquid painting effect. At first look this album cover has a burst of blues with a striking pink feature and a harmonious flow, but at a closer look you may notice a figure forming in the middle that could be interpreted as a face breaking out of the album.

Acknowledgement of Country

The School of Design and Architecture respectfully acknowledges the Wurundjeri peoples of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Owners and knowledge-keepers of the lands, waters and sky that surround us, where we work, learn, create, communicate and make place. We recognise that sovereignty has never been ceded and this always was and will always be Wurundjeri Country. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who continue to make a better world through design.

We extend our acknowledgement to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff, students, alumni, real-life clients, and knowledge keepers, who have contributed to our own education diversity and growth. We will continue to ensure that staff and students respectfully honour ancestral connection to Country and Place in everything that they do.

We are dedicated to the notion of design to make a better world and we acknowledge that making tools, shaping place, sharing stories, making meaning, wayfinding and collaborating have long been and continue to be both central and integral to First Peoples' cultures. We recognize that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ cultural contributions have continued relevance to design practice and commit to: reconciling ancestries of design and contemporary practice as well as pursuing culturally and professionally appropriate ways to engage with a diverse population of colleagues, industries and clients. In a time of treaty-making and voice we understand that there are overlaps between caring for Country and the sustainable production of goods, services, experiences, products and buildings.

Guided by the principles of respect, reconciliation, and reciprocity we undertake to indigenising and decolonising design practice by dismantling colonial structures and challenging biases that have marginalised Indigenous voices and design.

As students of SoDA you will be given opportunities to both engage with and educate yourself in Indigenous creative practices and cultural protocols through a lens of inclusivity, diversity, respect, mutual understanding, inter-cultural dialogue in all aspects of design practice. Indigenous people have been telling stories, making tools, and connecting to Country through visual media, placemaking and place marking for more than 60,000 years and these practices are part of an ongoing, evolving and live tradition.